by John Farris
He had forgotten about breaking into the house; he was certain now that it was empty. His eyes were on the graceful moths, the frost-white roof of the stable by the shining pond. He walked slowly toward the low building. Halfway there his feet began to crunch in frozen grass, to leave sharply etched prints. His breath condensed hugely in the windless air, surrounding him, accompanying him like ghosts.
Suddenly there were other footprints in the grass, converging from a dirt path that led to the house, going toward the stables. Duane paused.
He could distinguish at least two sets of prints, one of them made by a child. The other foot was small too, more like a woman's. Neither of I hem wore shoes.
And in the midst of the welter of footprints there was a swath, as if something heavy had been dragged from the house to the stables by the barefoot woman and the child.
His shuddering was like spasms, like a seizure; cold as he was, Duane still felt a sharp tingling shock at the top of his spine. There was a soft sifting noise in the windless night, the wings of many moths fluttering. From far off he heard the mournful horn of a diesel engine. He heard the soft slap of a screen door fifty yards behind him. He whirled.
She was standing there on the lower steps of the back porch, staring at him. Wearing dark clothing, a jacket with a hood pulled up. He couldn't see her eyes or face in the dark, but he thought he knew her anyway.
"Enid!"
His voice, carrying a long way on this still night, prompted a dog to bark across the pond. Duane started toward the house but stumbled, his toes numbed in the moccasins he wore. He went down on one knee, a sudden jabbing pain, and got up awkwardly, hobbled, looking for Enid again.
He saw her running, not to him but to the Buick he'd left in the driveway with the engine running. It looked to Duane as if her feet were bare, but he couldn't be sure.
"Enid, wait! Where's—"
She got into the Buick as he began to run, too. She didn't hesitate. The headlights came on, the car began backing, tentatively at first, veering toward the front porch as if she didn't know how to drive, or because without shoes she couldn't control the car very well. Duane, ignoring the pain in his knee, raced after her.
For a few moments the Buick paused, as if she'd stalled it, back end off the drive and in a bed of yellow chrysanthemums, headlights full in his face. He couldn't see her behind the wheel until he reached the edge of the gravel. Her eyes were large and somber and blackened, as if by an excess of mascara. Her face, what he could see of it within the loose-fitting hood of the jacket, was barely recognizable, looking pale and artificial, as fragile and white as eggshell, as if she'd made herself up for an early Halloween party. Or something more sinister than partying.
"Hey, no!" Duane shouted witlessly. "That's my dad's car, I stole it!"
Enid stepped on the gas. The back wheels spun, the car rocked back and nudged against the foundation of the house, then shot forward, straight at him.
Duane threw himself out of the way and rolled as the Buick skidded by him, made a wide turn, missed a fig tree by inches and roared on down the drive, slewing from one side to the other until it reached Old Forge Road. By the time he was on his feet, still clutching the spray gun in one hand, all he could see of his father's car were the taillights. She was going west.
Duane limped to the house and inside by way of the back porch, shouting for Marjory, looking for a light switch that didn't work when he tried it. The house was freezing cold, illuminated only by the moon.
"Marrrrjorrryyyy!"
Even in his frenzy something made him stop, reconsider. Instead of roving through the dismal house he retreated, hurried down the back steps and headed for the walking-horse stables again until he picked up the dragged path through frosted grass, the footprints.
They led him straight to a wide stable door that seemed stuck or locked when he pulled on the handle. Touching it was as painful as putting his hand in a fire. He was able to open the door an inch. Duane stuffed the bulky spray gun inside his denim jacket. Whining in fright and frustration, he dug in his heels and seized the edge of the door, yanking furiously, dragging it across the frozen ground.
The door yawned open, rusted old hinges screeching.
Inside it was like Christmas, as Christmas might be celebrated in hell. Moonlight shone through a construct of spun silk as finely wrought as frozen breath in which trapped luna moths fluttered and glowed, bleeding their soft pastel colors down the delicate strands. All the myriad strands seemed to converge, like the cables of a fabulous suspension bridge, on a lumpy object near the center of the stable floor between the dark and long-deserted stalls. It took Duane a couple of moments to realize he was looking at a flayed human body: red shinbones and feet sticking out of the faery maze, skinned hillock of rib cage as if gnawed over by rats. But it was too cold for rats in this hideaway of fiends, almost too cold for Duane to think and move; unfortunately he could still feel and be shattered.
"God . . . Marjory."
Alastor looked up, the bloody juices of the skin he was rapidly chewing dripping from his chin, running down his skinny white torso. Apparently he'd been chewing up luna moths too, blending them with the opaque human skin that already had an iridescent sheen. He was half crouched, half sitting on the unseen head. His eyes blazed with the same obscene lividity as the flesh of—
"You little . . . s-ssson of a bitch."
Alastor chortled.
"Birka said I could! Said I was old enough to make my own robe. She'll help me when she gets here. They're all coming tonight, she said!"
"You s-sssson of a bitch!" Duane almost lost sight of him through the cloud of expelled breath that instantly froze in front of his face. "She's not coming. S-s-she drowned. I s-sssaw her drown."
"Ho-ho," said the pint-sized monster, "that's what you think! Huldufólk cain't drown. She just crawled and crawled on the bottom of the pool till she could crawl up the side and get out. See? You cain't never hurt none of us!" Alastor stirred, lowering the piece of macerated skin he was working on, licking his lips. He began to rise on bowed legs, grinning at Duane. Every tooth in his head glowed like radium. "But we can hurt you."
"N-no you w-won't," Duane said, knowing he had to run and aware that he couldn't. He no longer could feel his feet in the flimsy moccasins he'd been dumb enough to wear without socks. His face was so stiff it felt crystallized. Only his hands, thrust inside his denim jacket, had much feeling. He stared at the remains on the floor, the pale blur of the soles of Marjory's feet, untouched in the skinning. Alastor continued to rise, setting aside his handiwork on a skein of silk mobbed with little jewels of frost.
"I need you," he said. "Need you before you get too cold and I can't flay you. I need your sssskin!"
"D-don't t-t-touch me. I'm w-w-warning—"
Alastor sprang up from the stable floor, into the midst of the spun cocoon, and traveled through it like a spider responding to a signal from the edge of its web. He was so skittishly quick that all Duane glimpsed of him were the glittery little eyes and the gap-toothed radiant smile, the needle-tipped curve of Alastor's fledgling thorn. He heard Alastor's high-pitched excited laughter.
Duane took a bumbling step backward and was hung up in clinging, stubborn silk. He sagged close to the floor, knees not quite touching, and opened his jacket. He didn't need to raise his head to know that Alastor was almost on top of him. His nose was stopped up with crystals of ice. He breathed through his mouth, searing the back of his throat.
"What's that?" Alastor growled as Duane brought both hands up, holding the spray gun. They were less than two feet apart, Alastor reaching out with his thorny hand.
Duane shoved the handle of the gun home, and showered Alastor with carbon tetrachloride.
The little fiend reacted like a normal child thrown into a scalding bath, except he couldn't scream: there was no air in his lungs to scream with. But he writhed, vomiting, in the strands of the cocoon, his dead white flesh toning to an almost-human pink, then shadi
ng again, swiftly, giving off a noxious vapor worse than the chemical smell of carbon tet, turning several shades darker, to the greenish-black of tainted meat, the purple of deep bruises. He tried to reach Duane again with the deadly point of his little finger but stabbed ineffectually. The horrible retching continued. There was nothing in Alastor's stomach; he was vomiting up the stomach itself, the esophagus, then the unused lungs in liquefying handfuls. As he flung himself about the steel-strong cocoon his body seemed to be collapsing on its skeleton, the babyish sticking-out bones.
Duane held his breath and sprayed Alastor again, full in the face, and saw the eyes melt in their sockets, his little radium teeth fall like the dimming sprinkle of suffocated moths throughout the stable. Then he had to turn away to vomit himself while the strands of the cocoon vibrated in concert with Alastor's violent throes. Kicking, flailing, Alastor unjointed himself and literally came apart, nearly all melted down to gleaming bones, the emerging skull with its skull-like grin. Duane couldn't look away, he saw it all, but he didn't see—
The hollow black thorn. Where was the thorn?
All chilling silence inside the stable now, except for Duane's ragged breathing. The dangerous inhalation of carbon tetrachloride was making him woozy.
The thorn, the thorn! Find the thorn . . .
But he was fainting from lack of air, he couldn't remain in the stable any longer.
Duane was almost out the door, staggering, gulping a clean lungful of air, when he heard, from somewhere inside the stable, a muffled cry for help.
6
Enid Waller drove the Buick Riviera past the main campground at Dante's Mill State Park, going toward the millpond and the restored town. According to the clock on the dashboard, it was ten minutes to one in the morning, but she hadn't looked at the clock during her forty-five minute drive from Sublimity. "Time" was an abstract concept in which Enid no longer took an interest.
Halfway to the town of Dante's Mill an impulse made her slow down from an already sedate twenty miles an hour and look for a turnoff, a nature trail not ordinarily accessible to automobiles. When she found the trail she drove a couple of hundred yards into the woods, scraping the Buick through shrubbery and low-hanging branches.
When it seemed she must be in the right place she stopped. There was no ignition key, so Enid left the motor idling and got out. She stood by a front fender of the Buick, staring at a full display of stars, listening to owls in the woods, the occasional rustle of small animals in the understory. Her right hand was in the pocket of her lightweight parka, gripping a pair of pinking shears. She waited patiently, eyes on the sky. The temperature was near forty degrees and dropping. She didn't feel the cold.
At first it looked like a slightly-larger-than-average star, faintly colored and slowly adrift above the tree line; then, as Enid concentrated on this oddity it grew in size and took on a definite shape, complete with wings, like the wings of a butterfly or moth, but infinitely more beautiful. It was coming toward her now, through a gap in the tree line, and Enid's lips parted in wonder. She saw a wrapped, oval face, like that of a nun, a piercing blue eye. The gently undulating wings were like a veil across her field of vision; then Birka alighted a yard or two in front of her. She was firmly nude, with a figure no better than Enid's; but so beautifully white. Enid wanted to touch her, as if she were a piece of sculpture. But she kept a hand in her pocket, and the other politely by her side.
I'm so glad you came, Enid.
Enid licked her pale lips with a nearly bloodless tongue and looked puzzled.
"That's good. You perceive, but don't quite receive me. I was afraid you'd turned completely already, even though I was very specific to Alastor."
"Turned?"
"Become one of us. He's overeager, like any child. Pricking here, pricking there. That can have no effect, or some effect, or catastrophic effect. A terrible muddled thing neither human nor huldufólk. Never mind." Birka stepped toward Enid, who didn't move as Birka lowered the hood of her parka. Enid's hair had become very thin on one side. Birka covered her head again, tenderly. "You'll be huldufólk soon enough. But first we need your help. Will you help us, Enid?" It was a kind of false pleading; her smile was sly. But Enid was too stunned by the changes that had come over her during the past few weeks to make fine emotional distinctions.
Enid licked her lips again. She pulled out the heavy pinking shears and showed them to Birka.
"Is this what you wanted me to bring?"
Birka's eyes glinted. "Yes, darling. Those should do nicely. Now we'd better be going. I'm afraid to let the others lie there even for another hour. The sanctuary was violated, and I'm very much afraid it might be again." Birka was folding her wings as she spoke, compactly, so that she could carry them like a small cushion in one hand. "By the way, how is your lovely little sister?"
"Marjory?" Enid frowned, as if it were difficult to remember anyone by that name. "Oh. I think she died. He wanted me to help him drag her to the stables. So I helped him. Then I came here."
"Well, I certainly hate to lose Marjory, but I had to give the boy something, you understand. To keep him from getting rambunctious and possibly giving us all away. Why don't you just follow me? I'm afraid it'll be rather difficult going for a while, but you're up to it, aren't you?"
"Yes."
'"Yes, Birka,' darling. Hm?"
"Yes, Birka," Enid said, eager to please.
7
Duane did not want to go back into the stables, even though the air seemed to be warming slowly inside, as if with the dissolution of Alastor there was no longer a source for the intense, life-threatening cold.
He heard the dog again, breaking into howls on the farm across the pond. And the muffled groaning inside, as if the poor mutilated girl on the floor still lived.
Oh, God, what could he do? But he knew he must do something, and quickly.
Duane put his shoulder to the stable door and pushed it as wide as he could, to allow a little more of the moonlight to penetrate the foggy silken interior: to let the cold and the nauseating fumes out. Moonlight glinted on the haphazard arrangement of bones and parched skin that had been Alastor. Harmless now, chemically rendered into a death more final than the Black Sleep; but still Duane was afraid, at the point of full-blown terror. Beyond the bones, the motionless flayed body, big feet foremost: seeing Marjory like that would be in his dreams forever.
But her feet, seen more clearly in a better light, without freezing clouds of his own breath to obscure his view, were almost too big to be Marjory's. Too ugly.
Duane crept back into the stable, crunching old frozen straw, skirting the menacing bones blackly freckled by carbon tetrachloride, his eyes on the frozen heap of body. ^
It wasn't a woman after all. It was a man: skinny, flaccid, gray-bearded. Missing teeth in the open mouth. Dark eyes open too, pierced. Who? A relative of Marjory's? Duane had never seen him before. It was obvious he had been dead for hours. He could not have moved since Duane—
There was a rustling in a stall behind him as he bent closer to look at the face of Alastor's victim. Duane wheeled in horror, throwing himself off balance; he windmilled and pitched into a rusty chain across the entrance to the stall, came down hard on his knees. One knee was already sow limn his earlier fall, and he cried out in pain.
The zipped-up sleeping bag thrown into a corner of the stall wriggled, and he heard her moaning, the sound so low it was as if she could barely breathe.
Duane scrambled into the musty stall, uncovering a stiffened rat in old straw, and pounced on the sleeping bag.
"Marjory! Marjory?"
She moved inside the sleeping bag; joyously he felt her, an elbow here, a knee there, the shape of her head. He fumbled for the zipper, breaking off a fingernail, yanked. The zipper didn't work very well. It yielded a balky inch at a time.
Her skin was white too, beneath the pale blond hair; her eyes were closed. For a few moments fright stopped him. What if—? He touched her; she was cold, that w
as obvious, but he couldn't tell how cold. There was, however, a welcome, human stink of urine from deep in the bag. He fought the zipper again. Marjory moaned softly. She had been stuffed naked into the bag.
"Eenniddd," Marjory said, through clenched teeth.
"Marjory, it's Duane!" He had the zipper open halfway, and began to pull her out of the sleeping bag. "Come on, come on, let's get out of here!" An arm and hand were free, but the hand flopped uselessly. He grasped the bottom of the sleeping bag and tugged hard; Marjory fell out in a heap, and immediately curled herself into a quaking ball.
"No, Marj, get up!"
He stood her on her feet, which crossed, the ankles wobbly. She looked all right, just confused, disoriented, half-smothered. Brain damage? Worse? He had to know, he had to see. Holding her with one arm at the waist, he explored the back of Marjory's neck with his fingertips. No indication of a puncture.
"Marjory? Talk to me. It's Duane!"
"Dway—"
She was beginning to take in great lungfuls of oxygen. "Say Duane," he demanded, leaning her against him, awkwardly walking them both out of the stall.
A smile flitted. Her eyes opened halfway for a moment. "Tha you, Dway?"
"Yes! You're gonna be all right!"
"I know. You here. Tha's good, Dway."
"Walk, Marjory, goddamm it, I can't drag—"
"Where go, Dway?"
"House. Bath. Clothes."
"Don't have . . . clothes on, Dway. See me . . . naked."
He lost control of her as they emerged from the stall. Marjory took two puny swaying steps and went down hard, next to the face of the corpse on the floor. She opened her eyes and stared solemnly at Alastor's victim. Duane got his hands under her arms again. Marjory looked around at him.
"Happened to Mr. Crudup?"
